Pricing on usage vs. Pricing per seat | Hacker News Reader

Pricing on usage vs. Pricing per seat

gaglers.com

13 pointsbevenky7 comments

The reason that people prefer per-seat is because humans historically have a great fear large downsides. Paying per-seat is a form of insurance - I know I'm paying a premium but I won't get any shocks that the end of the month.

The point about having a fixed upfront cost/ceiling is valid. This is the reason why we have pricing plans with a fixed cost based on the customer's estimation of their usage. If you signup for a $19 plan, you will not be charged more than $19 per month.

Companies are able to roughly estimate their monthly conversations based on the number of conversations they have in a day. After this estimation if the number of conversations exceed their monthly limit, we currently do not prevent the extra conversations or charge the customers more.

We hope to have a open conversation with our customers who consistently exceed their limit and figure out the right model for the customer. The underlying philosophy about our pricing is, we want help our customers succeed by enabling their support and sales conversations, and not be a barrier ourselves.

A bit of a fluff piece just promoting Gaglers, but the underlying assertion is worth thinking about. A per-seat license model has definitely pushed me away from certain products, while a pure usage model is much more appealing to me.

A fixed price would give peace of mind to someone like me. A pay as you go plan would just increase the uncertainty. I would always choose a fixed price plan, unless the cost saving with the pay as you go plan would be significantly lower given the average number of chats that would happen on my site.

For a small 4-6 people team, a comparable product will cost you about $100. Even if you have 10 chat conversations a day, it will cost only about $19 for all the team members to participate using Gaglers.

We think encouraging more team members to participate in the conversations gives the company lot of good karma with your customers as well.

By the same argument, Gaglers encourages their users to give curt, limited support to the public, since every interaction has marginal cost.

I'd rather have an extended conversation with a dedicated support rep, then a 1-line brush off from the CEO.

Hi, co-founder of Gaglers here. A chat conversation can have any number of messages of any arbitrary length.

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